


A Trip for the Ages

by youwilllovemylaugh



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Asexual Henry, Belly Kink, Belly Rubs, Canon Compliant, Chubby Gansey, Cuddling & Snuggling, F/M, Feeding Kink, Feel-good, Fluff, Hand Feeding, M/M, Multi, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Overeating, Pasta, Post-Canon, Post-The Raven King, Queerplatonic Relationships, Road Trips, Stuffing, Travel, Weight Gain, asexual gansey, demisexual blue, italian adventures, kinda??, lots of pasta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-17
Updated: 2017-08-17
Packaged: 2018-12-16 10:05:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11826477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youwilllovemylaugh/pseuds/youwilllovemylaugh
Summary: The idea had been Henry’s, dropped into their Facebook group message early on a Monday morning, which meant to Gansey that he should have been up late studying for finals.My traveling circus,he’d written,we should abscond to Italy for a few weeks this summer.





	1. Chapter 1

The idea had been Henry’s, dropped into their Facebook group message early on a Monday morning, which meant to Gansey that he should have been up late studying for finals. 

_ My traveling circus _ , he’d written,  _ we should abscond to Italy for a few weeks this summer _ . 

Gansey had quickly agreed. The trip to Italy, which, truth be told, wasn’t all that exciting to Gansey on the surface. He had been there numerous times before--once or twice with his parents or Helen, once alone the year he’d traveled Europe and met Malory, once for a reason he couldn’t seem to recall.

But it was hard not to be excited about the prospect of traveling together again, nevertheless. Though Blue had made the nine-hour trip to visit him at Harvard several times this semester--by bus, as she wouldn’t allow him to pay for airfare from Henrietta--the three of them hadn’t been together since the beginning of the school year. Henry had taken up permanent residence in St. Louis since being accepted to the University of Washington’s branch there, and though Henrietta would always be Gansey’s home, winter break had felt quiet without him in Henrietta. After spending almost the entire year prior in a car with both him and Blue, he felt unbalanced. Blue had agreed with him the last time he’d seen her--this time in Henrietta, after Gansey had declared Blue’s visits too costly, in both time and her resources. It had been too long since the three of them had spent any time all together.

It was also Blue’s first time out of the country, and it was hard not to be excited when he saw her face light up the way it did when he Skyped her the next evening.

“The best part is that I have just enough saved for a plane ticket, if we stop in Switzerland first,” she told him. “And then in Madrid on the way back.” It was late, and her room was dark behind her, and still her face was shining, her eyes bright in a way that made Gansey’s heart hurt.

“It would be easier to take nonstop flights,” Gansey said. “That way we won’t lose any luggage.”

“Then I won’t be able to pay for living space. Which--”

“Will have to be a mix of hotels and Airbnbs, I know,” Gansey said, not without affection in his voice. “There’s no chance you’ll just let me pay for it, right?” 

“Nope,” Blue said. “I have enough. And we have time before we leave. I can take on a few more shifts at Nino’s and save up more spending money once we make flight arrangements.” She sounded tired already; Gansey’s heart sank a little. 

“All right.”

She was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “Plus, if we stop in Switzerland, we can play around with all the chocolate we find.”

Gansey’s eyes snapped up. He felt his face get hot.

“You know Henry would agree,” Blue added, and it was true. It had been almost two years since Blue had told them how she felt about Gansey’s eating habits. She had “an embarrassing interest in watching him eat too much,” or so she said. He’d always felt guilty about how easily he came by and acquired food--in large quantities and varieties, at even his slightest whim or desire for something. The pile of pizza receipts on the floor of the Pig had grown to be both a source of embarrassment for him, and a reminder that they were only a fraction of how much he’d really indulged since he’d last cleaned it out.

But knowing that Blue  _ liked _ that, that she didn’t find it repulsive or privileged or indulgent--that set a whole new perspective on it for Gansey. A somewhat devilish flicker of delight had lit through him when she’d admitted it, and he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it since.

“You’re blushing,” Blue said, teasing.

Gansey put a hand to his face. “See what you do to me?”

“Mmm, I’m gonna do so much more to you than just that the next time I see you,” Blue said.

Gansey leaned into the camera as if he could go through it right to her. “That better be a promise.”

“You know it is,” she said. Then she begged off, citing a stack of quizzes she had to finish grading for her campus TA job and two essays she had to finish writing.

He spent the rest of his last week in Cambridge dreaming of Henrietta, of Blue’s oak- and lavender-scented skin, of Henry’s six-inch hair, which he’d stripped blond over the course of the year. He dreamt of Italy: the Roman catacombs, the Forum, the Venice Biennale, for which he hoped they’d be in town. And the  _ food _ . His stomach flipped at the idea of being around all that rich food with Blue around to feed it to him, with Henry around to egg him on. It didn’t feel like it could be real.

And it still didn’t feel quite real when they were on line at the airport, waiting to get through security.

“I take it we’re going to Italy now,” Henry said. He’d arrived in Henrietta late the night before and crashed with Gansey, but everything had felt off-balance, just the two of them snuggled up in bed, until they picked up Blue for brunch the next day. 

“We must be,” Gansey replied. “Jane says it should be so.”

“It should be so,” Blue agreed. 

It was another twenty minutes before they were through security, but that sheen on Blue’s face didn’t wear off. Gansey found himself stealing looks at her every chance he got.

Gloriously, they found a small cluster of seats in a corner of the waiting area. They had an hour until boarding, then another half until takeoff. 

“What’s your favorite thing about Italy?” Blue asked as soon as they sat down.

“The women,” Henry said. Blue cocked an eyebrow. “Specifically, the older ones. I’ve never met an Italian grandma I didn’t like.” 

Gansey quirked up one side of his mouth. “I’m sure they’ve never met a Henry Cheng they didn’t like, either.”

“I know you haven’t,” both Henry and Blue replied at the same time. They high-fived.

“But really,” Blue continued. Her eyes were wide and Gansey was scrabbling for purchase as he fell into them. “What draws you to the sunburnt Tuscan hills?”

“Thousands of years of centralized, well-documented history and architecture,” Gansey replied. When Blue cocked an eyebrow, sending a small grin springing across Gansey’s lips, he added, “And the food.”

A similar smile appeared on Blue’s face. The night before Henry arrived, she and Gansey had gone to Nino’s and she had watched him consume an entire pizza by himself, absently, as he’d fretted over the arrival date of her passport. (He had offered three times to have it expedited, so she’d have a few days’ grace with it before their flight, but she, despite what he’d believed was her better judgment, had refused.)

The food in Italy was, in truth, delicious.

“Yaaaaaaaasssss,” Henry chimed in. “Pasta, pizza, cheese--what more could you want?”

“Truly,” Blue said, but her eyes were fixed on Gansey’s with a certainty Gansey found exhilarating.

They had not planned their trip around food, but as they sat in the airport, musing about the next three weeks for which they had yearned for weeks and which were now at their fingertips, it became apparent that such an oversight didn’t even matter. Food was everywhere in Italy--papardelle al cinghiale and gelato in Florence, supplì in Rome, cheese in Naples, all the wine in Venice--it wouldn’t be hard. Gansey could still remember a hundred different dishes he had eaten during previous visits, and he was certain there would be dishes even more memorable this time around.

It was nearing eleven o’clock at night by the time they boarded, and Gansey had been watching Blue’s eyes droop in their usual manner for nearly the whole hour they had been waiting. They had been able to secure three seats in a row--in coach, as Blue had insisted--and as soon as they had shoved their belongings into the overhead bin, Henry took the window seat.

“You look so sleepy, Blue,” he said, in a tone more tender than Gansey thought he’d ever heard before. 

“Yeah, I don’t know what happened,” Blue said. She slid into the middle seat and leaned her head back.

“It’s the end of your shift,” Gansey said. “Your body is telling you it’s time to go home.”

She’d kept her eyes open long enough to hear him speak, and then she promptly laid her head on Henry’s shoulder. “I’ll wake up for takeoff.”

Henry chuckled softly, and Gansey caught the soft, happy look Henry tossed his way. 

“This trip is gonna be so rad,” he said. Gansey smiled at his earnestness, and took a deep breath as if he could inhale some of that assuredness for himself.

Three, two, one, and they were off in the sky. Liftoff was smooth and easy, and Blue was asleep within minutes. Part of Gansey wanted to wake her up, to insist that she stay up with him to watch the night sky unfold over the Atlantic. He loved that view more than many things, the stars glinting in the distance, on the shimmering horizon, the vast and unknowable wine-dark sea miles below them. Henry had kept the shade open for him, so he could watch the sky blur as they traveled from night, to dawn, to day.

Gansey didn’t sleep. He never slept, well or at all, on planes. There was too much excitement in his veins, too much novelty in the experience. He’d flown so much over the course of his short life, and yet he was still somehow so charmed by it, so taken by the rules and regulations and the order of it all. It was an incredibly  _ Gansey _ thing to be excited about--this was something of which he was well and regrettably aware--but he couldn’t help himself.

He might have been jealous of Henry’s window seat if it were not for the adorable picture of he and Blue asleep on each other, slumped against that very window. He slid his phone out of his pocket and snapped a picture of them, Henry’s slender wrist bent somewhat painfully under his cheek, Blue’s face smushed against Henry’s chest. He debated whether to show it to them when they landed, or keep it to himself, a little secret.

Night dwindled out the window. Gansey’s eyelids drooped, but nevertheless he remained awake enough to watch as the horizon purpled, then pinkened, then burst into a blue so full he felt his heart swell with wonder.

They were somewhere over the Atlantic still, approaching the Mediterranean. He loved to spot the Portuguese coast as they flew over, to watch as Spain’s mountains unfurled beneath them, and give way to the Tyrrhenian, before their descent into Rome began. 

They would begin in Rome, for three days. Then, they would descend into Naples for another four--Gansey thought, briefly but with a burst of excitement, about what Blue might think of Pompeii--and then travel northward to Florence, Milan, and Venice for the final eight. There was so much to look forward to, and it was a feeling that, only a year after he died, after he found Glendower and he began to breathe again, it was a feeling that Gansey was both in awe of and apprehensive about.

Blue stirred, then. Like something out of a dream, he thought. Maybe it was her psychic powers, even though she insisted they were latent.

“Hey,” she asked. She stretched her limbs and patted her cheek, which looked damp. 

Gansey smiled at her, her hair sticking up in all directions, her sleepy brow which he’d learned always looked furrowed in the mornings when she rose. “Hey, sleepyhead.”

“Where are we?” She looked out the window, as if she might be able to pinpoint their coordinates.

“Still cruising over the Atlantic. Haven’t hit Portugal yet.”

She smiled at him, and then quirked an eyebrow at him in an almost sad kind of way.  “Are you okay? Have you been awake this whole time?”

He nodded. “I’ve been watching you drool on Cheng for almost five hours.”

Blue rolled her eyes. “He’s probably not gonna be happy about that.”

“I don’t think he’ll notice.”

Blue shifted in her seat, settled against Gansey this time. It wasn’t new to him, to feel her body on his, but it still felt as good as it had in the very beginning. Not forbidden anymore, but still exclusive. She took his hand and lifted his arm over her, so that his hand rested somewhere low on her stomach. “But you’ll notice, right?”

“If you drool on me? Hell yeah, I will.”

She giggled; he liked the way it felt through her. “Ya big stickler,” she said, before drifting off again, without clarifying what exactly he was a stickler for.

He rubbed his thumb up and down on top of her tunic, recalling the way she’d slid her hand under his shirt that night after Nino’s. He’d gone so long on this flight without thinking about it, but now, with Blue so close, it was all he could do not to. She’d asked if it was okay, to let her hands go there, even though they’d been all over each other for the better part of the last year. And when he’d said yes, she’d put her hand right on his belly, the little roll of fat that had been gathering around his waistband for the better part of the last year, too. She’d squeezed it, once, twice, and Gansey had felt himself go hot, felt his bottom lip curl up between his teeth.

_ Are you okay? _ she’d asked, and he’d replied,  _ Yes, get over here _ , like an idiot, before sliding the driver’s seat of the Pig back as far as it would go and feeling her slide fully on top of him the way he’d so rarely let himself dream of.

With Blue like a weighted blanket on top of him, Gansey drifted ever more closely toward sleep. 

And then, they were being told to fasten their seatbelts for the descent. 

Gansey’s eyes snapped open first. Blue did so shortly after him, smacking Henry awake as she deployed the armrest and sat upright for the first time all flight.

When they landed, Gansey felt the world opening another new portal to somewhere inside him. 

 


	2. Chapter 2

Rome was hot. _Hot._ It was only late May, but already the weather had taken a turn toward summer that no one had been expecting.

Their Airbnb was air-conditioned, luckily, but their host had requested they only use it at night. And though they’d already planned on being out most of each day, the reality of returning to a sweltering third-floor walk-up apartment after traversing most of Rome on foot had become gruesome to all three of them by the second day.

Reluctant to return to what Henry had dubbed their personal Roman bathhouse, he suggested they visit a bar near the Roman Forum, their last stop on their itinerary for the day, to cool off.

“We’re here for a reason,” he said, as they lingered on the sidewalk nearby, deciding what to do. “And that reason has nothing to do with sleeping away our nights abroad.”

Blue, who had not adjusted to the time difference so well, raised a skeptical eyebrow. “How exactly are you standing right now, though?”

“Magic, and the prospect of a good time,” Henry replied. “Jet lag is for _believers_ in jet lag. All you gotta do is say you’re not jet lagged, and then you won’t be.”

Gansey’s brain snapped over something. “If you can’t be awake, try to be un-tired and happy,” he said. Henry’s eyes flitted up to meet his in a clandestine, appreciative way.

“As Dick puts it,” Henry said, palming Blue’s shoulder with one hand and gesturing towards Gansey with the other.

Blue rolled her eyes, but she didn’t seem annoyed. “This bar better be close by.”

 _If you can’t be unafraid, be afraid and happy_ , Gansey heard in his head. The whispery tone reminded him of how Cabeswater used to talk to them. It sent a chill up his spine. He’d been so close to reciting it perfectly.

The bar Henry knew of turned out to be remarkably close--only a few blocks’ walk. As soon as they sat down, and with her backpack no longer on her shoulders, Blue seemed much more awake.

“You’d be getting up for school now, anyway,” Gansey said to her. “It’s morning in Henrietta.”

“I haven’t woken up before eight or nine in almost a year,” she said.

Gansey pretended to scoff.

“A regular heathen, we have in our midst,” Henry said, nudging Gansey.

“Our Blue,” Gansey replied.

Blue’s face melted at that, and though she made an admirable attempt to harden it back up, it wasn’t as convincing the second time around.

Henry, despite his complete inability to recall, retain, or speak any Italian, had proven very knowledgeable about the culture, about Rome specifically, and after Gansey translated the menu for him, Henry made several, long-winded suggestions about the wine list.

Blue, Gansey noticed, was only blinking at him. “I’m good with whatever,” she said, once he’d finished. “We only ever have liquor in our house, anyway.”

Henry looked to Gansey next, who said, “A Frascati is always best.”

When the waiter arrived, Gansey ordered for them in his perfect Italian, and then they waited.

“Do you think they have any pastries?” Blue asked. “It’s getting late.”

She was looking at Gansey when she said this, and Gansey shrugged at first, and then he _noticed_ that she was looking _at Gansey_ when she said this. “Maybe, I can ask--” he blurted, and he began to search almost frantically for their waiter.

“Somebody’s hungry,” Henry said, and Gansey fought simultaneous urges to look at Blue and to _not_ look at Blue under any circumstances.

So he looked at Henry.

“Well, if we’re drinking, we might as well eat something,” Gansey said.

“Why stop at pastries, then?” Henry asked. “Let’s do the full deal.”

Gansey caught Blue blushing as his eyes swept over her toward the door to the trattoria. they had not yet eaten dinner, but Gansey knew the direction they were headed.

“I could go for pasta,” he heard her say.

“I’m sure Gansey could as well,” Henry added. His smile was too sly for him not to have picked up on what was happening.

“All right then, pick something out,” Gansey said. “I know what I’m having.”

They picked out dishes, and then Gansey listed them off in rambling Italian to the waiter, who arrived smelling heavily of smoke and the alley they’d passed on their way here. He did not let on that he’d ordered two dishes of bucatini all’amatriciana for himself.

“You speak so fast,” Blue noted.

“That’s what happens when you spend three weeks having to talk to diplomats and trying to talk to their kids,” Gansey said. That had been a summer trip, some years before Henrietta, before the search for Glendower had even began, that his father had brought him on in the hope of helping him forget about the wasp incident.

Gansey stopped thinking about that immediately.

“So shiny,” Blue said. Gansey flinched--it was a word she’d used too often to describe people and things she found sorely above her station, and too derisively so, for him not to instantly be self-conscious--but there wasn’t a hint of malice in her voice. It had been just an offhand comment, probably made among her two closest friends, two boys out of the four in the universe that she trusted.

Still, he felt a little floaty. A little out of sorts. He felt a sudden, inconsolable desire for Ronan Lynch, for his brash and dangerous certainty in knowing what to do when Gansey began to lose control.

The wine arrived. It was white, smelled citrusy. Ronan always brought him orange juice to calm his nerves, so he figured it might do the trick.

He had ordered a bottle, and it had not even been placed in the bucket of ice now beside them before Gansey had toasted his friends’ health and knocked back much of the first glass, eager to be rooted back here, and not afraid of something he was bound not to find here, now.

 _If you can’t be unafraid, be afraid and happy._ He opened his eyes--he’d closed them to drink--and stared directly into Henry’s dark, warm ones, and tried to force himself calm.

Blue reached over, somewhat idly, and touched his hand then, rubbed her thumb over the back of it. He took a breath.

“What did you end up ordering?” she asked, and her voice felt a little floaty in his ears, but he couldn’t be sure if it was his brain doing that, or the rush of wine on an empty stomach.

He cleared his throat. “Bucatini all’amatriciana. It’s hot, and has pork in it.”

“Feeling dangerous, Gansey?” Henry asked with a wicked smile.

“Maybe he’s feeling particularly spicy today,” Blue suggested, adding her own version of a wicked smile to the mix. She’d really picked up Calla’s eyebrow quirk well.

“Just a little hot, you know,” Gansey said, and he could feel that he wasn’t on par with the others, but they laughed anyway.

And the waiter arrived some moments later, with four heaping plates of pasta, instead of three. His stomach flipped--what if he'd read their faces wrong, what if they hadn't wanted to do this, and so publicly--but he caught Blue’s eyes widening as she realized what was happening, saw the curl of Henry’s smile get sharper as he did, too.

Gansey immediately felt better.

“What did you _do_?” Blue’s face was incredulous. Gansey had to fight laughter.

“He tricked us,” Henry said. “Distracted us with all that fancy Italian smooth-talking.”

“You guys are just so easily distracted, in the first place,” Gansey said. He picked up his fork and spoon and began twirling the pasta around to eat.

Blue gasped in fake-outrage. “I can't believe you would call _me_ distracted. Now you're just going to have to eat all of that pasta and prove it.”

“Prove what?” Gansey asked.

“That you didn't mean it,” Blue said. “Or else.”

“Or else?” Henry repeated.

“Or else he's going to be eating dessert right here, too, instead of at home in our bed,” Blue said.

She gave him a very self-satisfied look, chin perched on her wrist, sly grin on her face. Gansey cocked an eyebrow at her, as Henry made various whooping noises into his fist. He had gathered a large cyclone of pasta on his fork, and so he shoved the whole thing into his mouth. Blue’s eyes widened again.

“You're on, Jane,” he said once he'd swallowed.

And so he ate. The pork, which was in large chunks instead of small shreds like Gansey was used to, was soft and tender on his tongue, and the pepper flakes didn't prevent him from stuffing his face one large forkful at a time.

But the bucatini, despite its thin structure, was heavy, and it sat that way in his stomach. By the time his fork scraped the bottom of his first dish, he was beginning to feel reasonably full.

He looked around when he was finished, like he was coming up for air. Henry’s plate was three-quarters full, and he was pushing around the remains. Blue’s was barely half-eaten, which was kind of a shame to Gansey.

“It doesn’t appear that I even needed to order this second dish,” he said.

“Well,” Blue said slowly, “you could still finish this, too.”

“There’s no take-away in Italy,” Gansey said. “At least probably not here.”

“I don’t think she’s suggesting it for take-away, bro,” Henry said. Even his smile was devilish now, and Gansey felt a little cornered--and with it, a little hot under the collar of his bright purple polo shirt.

“Just think about it,” Blue said, leaning forward. She took up his fork and began to swirl around the remaining pasta on her dish with it. “How impressed we’d be once we got you into bed.”

There was something vampy about how she looked at him, and it was weird, but it was kind of … great. Like it was through her eyelashes, or something, or from the side of her eyes. Gansey felt a thrill tickle his stomach.

“We would certainly be very impressed,” Henry said, leaning forward as well.

Gansey looked at the two beautiful people in front of him and reached for the fork from Blue’s hand, ready to prove them right--but she pulled it out of his grasp.

“No, no,” she said. “This one’s on me.”

She fed him the forkful of pasta, all the rest of what was on her plate in one bite, holding his eyes with hers the whole time. That thrill reappeared in his stomach. He took the fork from her, and then broke ground on his second plate of bucatini all’amatriciana.

It was a _lot_ of pasta. Halfway through his second plate, when Gansey leaned back in his chair to alleviate some of the heaviness on his waistband, Henry slid his plate over.

“Maybe a change in flavor will help,” Henry suggested.

All it did was give Gansey hiccups.

He thought it was going to give Blue an aneurysm. Little, half-hiccups, half-burps escaped his mouth in between bites, and he couldn’t always catch them when they came. When he couldn’t, she bit her lip.

He smiled at her, and then at Henry, as if to say, _Can you believe her?_

Their relationship had always been easy. It felt natural to Gansey to love two people at once, who also loved each other, and who didn’t seem to think it was weird. Their road trip the summer after high school had removed whatever remaining boundaries they had, but it had also taken down all of their reservations, all of their little insecurities and uncertainties. When Gansey had learned about asexuality, from Blue, who had been reading about demisexuality, something had clicked. Their relationship was so full to begin with--all that they had shared, all that they meant to each other--it felt even fuller when they realized these things about themselves together. Gansey had always felt safe in Blue’s arms, even if he hadn’t wanted to let himself, but after that realization, it was like another layer of security had blanketed them.

And that same something had clicked the first time the three of them had ever gotten into bed together, and Henry had told them he wasn’t into sex, either, that he’d prefer to be their nonsexual third, their queerplatonic partner.

They all fit so well together. It felt almost greedy to Gansey to learn that Henry, too, liked watching him eat. That just as much as Blue did, he, too, liked the extra fifteen, twenty pounds Gansey put on during their road trip, the additional ten or fifteen he’d arrived back in Henrietta with earlier this summer.

So Gansey ate. And he watched Blue’s eyes get starry, and Henry’s mouth curl tighter and tighter in the corners, and he let that thrill in his stomach make room for more, and more, and more until he was scraping the final pieces of pork into his mouth and letting out what turned out to be an embarrassingly loud belch into his napkin.

“There you go,” Blue said. She looked around and then reached over and gave his protruding belly a vigorous rub.

“Oh, god, Blue,” he said, through another burp. Henry giggled. “Easy.”

“I wish I could, but I can’t,” she said. “We have to get out of here.”

Gansey leaned back in his bistro chair, and thought for a second he heard the wrought iron groan. He felt a flush rise up on his cheeks. “All right, I’ll call the waiter over.”

Most of the other trattoria patrons had cleared out, and Gansey saw the waiter loitering by its entrance, fiddling with an unlit cigarette. When he looked over, he gave the table a withering look, as if he couldn’t believe the fat American boy in front of him had eaten all of that food.

He managed to pay the check, and only after the waiter cleared their plates did Gansey truly feel the weight of what he’d just done sitting on his thighs.

When the waiter left, he groaned.

“Yeah?” Blue said. She stood up then, and put her hand on his shoulder, which she began to massage. “You wanna go home now, hm?”

“We should,” Henry said. “I don’t think any of us is going to last very long in these streets.”

Somehow, their apartment was only a short walk from the trattoria, and somehow, miraculously, Gansey managed the stairs with only a short break in the middle, and several dozen hiccups, which echoed through the stairwell and made Blue giggle with delight.

Bed felt miraculous.

No pants also felt miraculous, and when Blue finally unbuttoned the khaki cargo shorts he’d been wearing, it was all he could do to let out a sigh of relief and then another burp, which he concealed in his fist.

“You’re mighty full, aren’t you?” Henry asked. He ran a hand up over Gansey’s protruding belly and then tapped his nose. “Just an enormous son of a gun, waiting for one of us to make it better.”

He’d forgotten how forward Henry could be, and he felt that same flush rise up on his cheeks.

Blue kissed one of them. “He’s done quite a bit of work this evening,” she said in response to Henry. “He should be rewarded, shouldn’t he?”

Gansey smiled at her, feeling sleepy, and she took his face in her hands and kissed him full on the mouth.

Henry’s hands strayed, mostly massaging the top side of Gansey’s belly, rubbing circles around his belly button and pressing tiny kisses into his sides. He put a hand on Henry’s back, then under his T-shirt, pulling him closer.

Blue got on top of Gansey then--to admire how full he was, he knew. With Henry’s hand on her thigh, she inched Gansey’s shirt up over his head, and then leaned down and kissed a line down the center of his body, starting from his mouth and ending up just above the waistband of his boxer briefs. Her touch was like magic, so much like the feeling he’d used to get when he found a new clue in his search for Glendower.

“You’ve gotten bigger since the last time we did this,” Henry said to him then, and then he pressed a kiss into Gansey’s cheek.

“Those shorts Blue just threw on the floor are a size 38,” he said before kissing Henry. They both broke out laughing when Blue groaned.

“You were a 36 at Christmas break,” she said.

He shrugged--or tried to. “I’ve been eating well.”

She squeezed a handful of pudge at his side. “Sure seems like it.”

He put his hand over hers, then guided it to the top of his belly, and she fell in on his other side. His hiccups had faded. Blue kissed his nose, and then each of his cheeks, and said, “Good. You look better with some meat on your bones.”

“Like this boy has ever skipped a meal,” Henry countered. He grabbed a handful of Gansey’s side, too, and Gansey was surprised at how much there was for him to hold. He felt a small pang of satisfaction, of sturdiness that he hadn’t felt before.

“Well, I certainly won’t be doing any such thing with either of you around,” he said. Blue giggled, and Henry just drew an affectionate finger down Gansey’s cheek, as if to agree.

The three of them lay there, slowly undressing each other and kissing occasionally, until they drifted to sleep, Gansey feeling quiet and safe and heavy, holding the people he loved at each of his sides, in a city he loved, at the start of what he knew would be a trip for the ages.


End file.
